Oliver Marks was kind of enough to come by the TechWeb office and do a brief interview with me about the Launch Pad program for Collaboration 2.0 on ZDNet. I’ve re-posted his post below, and you can find the full story on ZDNet here.
If you’re an Enterprise 2.0 entrepreneur, you’ve got until August 30 to Twitter pitch #e2conf-lp Paige Finkelman of the US Enterprise 2.0 Conference your ‘Launch Pad’ contest entry for consideration by the jury (which includes me), and broader audience votes.
The contest, to be held at the West Coast US edition of the show in November, is open to all Enterprise 2.0 vendors of any size that have launched or announced something new in 2010.
Paige spells things out above and you can find more details on the E2.0 blog, with rules and key dates listed on the official Launch Pad site.
Innovation is the lifeblood of any space, and you may find yourself on stage with Paige in November if your Enterprise 2.0 offering makes it to the finals, providing you with valuable exposure.
The concept of a Twitter pitch is a powerful one: simply send a tweet containing the hash tag #e2conf-lp and your contest entry from your Twitter account to get into the running.
Here’s a video archive of past finalists…I’m looking forward to seeing the new crop of entries and ideas…
All that stands between you and presenting on the Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara keynote stage is one Tweet. A mere 140 characters.
One week remains for enterprise 2.0 / collaboration vendors to Twitter pitch #e2conf-lp and tell the E2.0 team and Launch PadJury what you’re up to in 2010. The Launch Pad contest is open to all enterprise 2.0 companies - big or small - that have released or announced something new in 2010. A new product, a new version, a new partnership or integration point - so long as the announcement was made this year, it counts.
You can find more info on the E2.0 blog, and rules and key dates are listed on the official Launch Pad site.
Craft those 140 characters carefully and let her rip! Twitter Round 1 closes on Monday, August 30th. Looking forward to your submission, and best of luck with the contest!
Microsoft last week announced a connector between Microsoft Outlook, and profile information in Facebook. The service works by matching a user’s e-mail address to their Facebook profile. So if one of your contacts in Outlook is on Facebook, you will see whatever information is publicly available from their profile within Outlook (or whatever information you can access if you are “friends”).Microsoft previously announced a similar integration between Outlook at LinkedIn.
Microsoft’s move creates new challenges for organizations trying to balance the need to embrace the world of social software with concerns over security, compliance, privacy and productivity. Our 2010 benchmark of over 200 companies shows that 40% block access to public social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but often are forced to back off blanket bans due to employee demand or business justifications to participate in public social communities. Meanwhile, only 23% have a formal social strategy.
Allowing employees to engage with public social networks can provide real benefits in terms of building personal relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, but of course carries risk and must be implemented with respect to information protection requirements (See Socialware’s recently released Guide to Facebook Social Networking Compliance).
We continue to spend a lot of time working with our clients to try and help them balance the need for openness with the reality of governance. Enterprise managers should take efforts by Microsoft and others to poke holes in the social firewall as further justification for a proactive enterprise social strategy.
I’m attending this week’s annual SAP customer/partner conference: SAPPHIRENOW (Twitter hash-tag of the same name to follow numerous tweets). It’s the first time I’ve been here, mainly because things like ERP and BI have seemed like foreign languages to me given my background in real-time communication and collaboration, but what I’ve seen so far has been eye-opening, and exciting: the continued integration of social computing into business process management systems.
Given the rapid growth of Facebook over the last year it’s no wonder that many companies are embracing it to create communities for their customers, partners, and fans. But before deciding to use Facebook for your public facing community, or if you already using Facebook, think again.
There’s a lot of speculation on various blogs about Google’s acquisition of DocVerse, a startup founded by former Microsoft employees to enable co-authoring of MS Office documents. Most of the discussion has focused on the potential of Google integrating DocVerse into its apps portfolio, but given the chasm in terms of feature/functionality between Google Apps and Microsoft Office, it doesn’t seem that the idea of a MS Office and Google App user co-authoring a document is going to be feasible anytime soon.
Instead, is it possible that Google aims to position DocVerse as a hosted alternative to SharePoint for workgroup collaboratation, delivering a Wave-like functionality that integrates with Microsoft Office as a separate service from its Apps? The universe of Microsoft Office users is a massive order of magnitude larger than those using Google Apps, or who will use Google Apps in the next few years, so why not challenge Microsoft’s two big growth engines - SharePoint, and the forthcoming Office Live Workspace to provide a real-time collaboration capability compatible with Microsoft’s desktop suite?
Salesforce.com’s Chatter social computing service is now available to a limited number of private beta participants. Salesforce.com’s first shot across the social computing bow was fired back in November when they announced the service, now that the wraps are coming off we’ll see if Salesforce can compete against the likes of Microsoft, IBM, a plethora of emerging vendors, and even Cisco.
I think Chatter has the potential to be extremely disruptive. Salesforce brings some inherent strengths to the table, it’s arguably the most widely deployed software as a service, via the SaaS delivery model Salesforce can bundle Chatter with the services it’s already providing to end-user customers, in effect going around IT and undercutting more centralized attempts to bring social computing to the enterprise via stand-alone platforms such as Confluence, Jive, and SocialText, or as add-ons to collaboration tools such as SharePoint or the Notes/Domino/Quickr suite. Salesforce also points to the opportunity for its development partners to integrate Chatter into the tens of thousands of Force.Com developers, but to succeed Chatter must evolve beyond a Salesforce-based application and offer the opportunity to integrate into other collaboration applications. It must also overcome concerns related to compliance and security of storing potentially discoverable conversations in the cloud.
Google today announced “Buzz“, their attempt to merge the worlds of social computing with e-mail. Buzz adds social tracking features to your in-box, allowing you to see the social activity of your contacts. So what’s not to like?
I think the biggest issue with Buzz is its reliance on Gmail. Google makes the assumption that your e-mail contacts are your buddies, but that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve got a lot of folks in my in-box who are business or casual acquaintances, or whom are on mailing lists that I’m on, and who aren’t friends I’d want to follow. The people I want to follow are all in my Facebook account, but Google doesn’t yet connect to Facebook. If there’s a “killer app” that will move people from Facebook to Google, I don’t see it. Buzz may have some use as another social computing channel, but at this point I don’t see it replacing Facebook (or even LinkedIn).
Where Buzz, I think, has the greatest appeal is in creating a social community within companies using Gmail or Google apps as their corporate messaging environment. Buzz just fired a shot across the bow of all the social computing software or service vendors targeting SMBs. If you are already paying for a corporate Gmail service, you just got a whole suite of social tools as well.
There is one other problem, it doesn’t work. At this point I don’t see the “Buzz” link in my Gmail in-box, and from following various twitter comments, neither do many others.
IBM made a big splash today in advance of next week’s Lotusphere conference by announcing that Panasonic is abandoning its Exchange-based e-mail infrastructure for IBM’s LotusLive hosted e-mail offering. This news, coupled with recent wins by Google for its Apps and Gmail offerings may finally demonstrate that cloud-based collaboration services are starting to gain traction within the enterprise. It’s important to note in the IBM Lotus announcement that while iNotes is the initial hook, Lotus expects iNotes adoption to lead to deployment of cloud-based collaboration and social applications including Connections and Quickr as well as project management.
We’re starting to get a lot of questions from our enterprise clients about SaaS-based collaboration offerings. Key factors driving interest include potential for cost reduction, simplified infrastructure, and the ability to easily deploy a robust and reliable set of services across the globe. Key concerns limiting interest include the lack of customization, concern that customers will get a “lowest common denominator service” and concerns related to guaranteeing performance of Internet-based applications. I expect to spend a lot of time in 2010 following the rise of cloud-based collaboration.
Just a few short years ago it looked as though XMPP, the XML-based messaging protocol central to the Jabber IM platform, was fading away. Microsoft had committed to the SIP-derived SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) for its Live Communications Server IM platform, while iBM Lotus incorporated SIMPLE as the basis for Sametime. The momentum behind unified communications around 2006 appeared to leave XMPP in the dust, as vendors rapidly looked to SIP and SIMPLE as the basis for integration of presence with rich-media applications such as voice and video. But then a funny thing happened….
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
Aug 26th, 2010 |
